Rethinking Literary History -- Comparatively
THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS and METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS
As mentioned earlier, Fernand Braudel called his own historical work comparative not only because it crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries but because it involved what he called the "dialectic of past and present." (8) Similarly, literary history is inevitably the history of the literary past as read through the present. It cannot be simply a cumulative record of all that has been written or performed or even a compilation of themes or forms. The literary past--that is, the past of both literature's production and its reception--is unavoidably interpreted in the light of the present, and present knowledge of it will therefore be partial and provisional, but not insignificant for all that. A comparative literary history would have to acknowledge the epistemological limitations that its hermeneutic situation creates: each literary historian will be situated as a real person living in a particular linguistic and cultural community, and it is from that specific position that he/she can engage what phenomenologists call the "horizon" of the past. The literary texts of that past were created by people in a specific language, at a specific moment, in a specific place; but the literary historian is also an historical being, "situated" with similar particularity. The community of readers of any literary text, as Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, is historically constituted, but is never limited to its creator's contemporaries.

This hermeneutic underpinning of a "situated" literary history is only one of the senses in which there is a "dialectic of past and present." As the work of Hayden White and others has argued, it is in the present that the historian shapes and orders the events of the past, making meaning even more than recording it. (9) In Anglo-American literary criticism, the rise of what has been called the New Historicism is an example of a post-New Critical (post-formalist) return to the historical embeddedness of literature. It also marks a specifically literary engaging of the issues that historians and anthropologists have been debating for some time now, provoked by the work of marxists, feminists, and theorists of race, ethnicity, and sexual choice.

The implications of this notion of the "situatedness" of the literary historian dovetail with those created by the new awareness of (and openness about) the interpretive and narrating act involved in all history-writing. But such a concern has special resonance for the literary historian: perspective, interpretation, and narration are among the staples of the study of literature, as much as history or anthropology. Work such as Paul Ricoeur's multi-volumed Temps et récit, with its painstaking study of the reconfiguration and refiguration of time by narrative--both historical and fictive--provides the kind of helpful bridge between disciplines that has made possible this project's comparative focus. As a human construct, literary history too is a narrativizing of literary "events", and its "archive" is a textualized one in only a more immediately self-evident way than is the archive of all historiography.

Analogies between the writing of history and the writing of literary history are also possible because of what intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra has articulated in terms of "the postulates of unity, continuity, and mastery of a documentary repertoire" (10) which have underpinned both endeavours in the past and which thus have come under close scrutiny in the wake of Foucaultian, post-colonial, and other critiques that point to discontinuities, gaps, ruptures, or exclusions rather than linear development, evolution, or continuity. This has meant that the very task of the literary historian too has to be rethought. In Hayden White's words: "a specifically historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group, society, or culture's conception of its present tasks and future prospects". (11) With this kind of shift from validation to signification, it isn't hard to see where the push might have come for literary historians to reconceptualize historical process in comparative terms to include the relations between texts and the contexts of production--and reception. Literary historians are also asking: "How did [a given] phenomenon enter the system entitled history and how has the system of historical writing acquired effective discursive power?"(12) The echo of Michel Foucault's linking of power and knowledge points here, as elsewhere in contemporary theorizing, to an awareness that, while literary events did occur in the past, we give meaning to--that is, we name and constitute--those "events" as literary historical "facts" by selection and narrative positioning. And those interpretive acts are carried out by people who are as "situated" in the particularities of time and place, language and gender as are the people who first produced the literature being studied. It is in this sense, perhaps, that we should read Nietzsche's admonition in The Use and Abuse of History: "You can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present". (13) In literary history too it is the present that always gives the past whatever meaning it accrues. This is not a defeatist invalidation of the process of writing literary history; it is merely a frank acknowledgement of a reality of interpretation.

As may be clear, we agree with Wolfgang Iser who wrote, in his recent introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of New Literary History, that literary history is the "epitome for the study of the humanities which exist first and foremost in dialogue...dialogue which happens on various levels: between past and present, between the voices of common concerns, between the conceptualizations of theory, between standards of valorization." (14) This (inevitable but complicating) multidisciplinary, multiperspectival comparative nature of the project is central to its conception. As one theorist put the paradoxical problem: "We must perceive a past age as relatively unified if we are to write literary history; we must perceive it as highly diverse if what we write is to represent it plausibly." (15) The principle of cohesion of the project as a whole lies not in the relation of each part of the project with the others in terms of content but rather in the comparative conceptualization and in the literary historiographic paradigm that together determine their common methodology. Given that this is a paradigm based on "local and particular" models (rather than "general and universal" ones), each separate part of the project has developed--of necessity--different models for its particular volumes.

In literary history, as theorists as diverse as Robert Weimann, Ralph Cohen and Claudio Guillén have shown, the "events" of the past to be ordered and given meaning are, in this case, literary texts--as they are produced and received--and, for the literary historian as interpreter, these texts act as both documents of the past and experiences of the present. This is another of the senses in which these projects involve a comparative "dialectic of past and present." In openly confronting this duality and in reflexively engaging with the fact (and consequences) of the power that accompanies the shaping and ordering process involved in the writing of any history, a comparative literary history such as is represented by this project would foreground these methodological frameworks (hermeneutic, post-structuralist, post-colonial, feminist, and so on) and directly address its own theoretical assumptions regarding both texts and contexts (socio-cultural, economic, political, aesthetic). How this might work in practice may become clearer if we turn now to the specific projects.

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Text - Copyright © 1996 Mario J. Valdés and Linda Hutcheon.